Lion’s Blood

Apparently Steven Barnes, whose Lion’s Blood I recently read and enjoyed and whom Kendall saw speak today (lucky bastard) and whose Zulu Heart was supposed to come out in March (come on people its almost April, you’re making me wait!), has a short story in the conjure tales anthology next to Gaiman. This is a good sign. Lion’s Blood is a much more intriguing and rich alternate history then Ruled was; I recommend it highly. One minor quibble, occasionally its ambitions as a parable get in the way of its story telling, leading, I think, to a time line with too many parallels to this one. Really only noticeable if you compare it to a master alternate history like Card’s Pastwatch.(which has a much subtler, is not nearly as enlightened, agenda) ### Ruled Britannia

Ruled Britannia ended predictably I’m afraid. I hoped until the very end for some surprise of substance, but it was not forthcoming. The 3 page historical end note on the other hand was fascinating. Turtledove talks about what would have been required for Spain to have invaded England at that time, and where the verse for the fictional Boudicca came from. In his estimation if the Armada had gotten lucky enough to land the Spanish infantry would have trounced their English counterparts. I wondered about Boudicca, as it seemed awfully good, and in fact Turtledove borrowed much of it from a play Bonduca, by Shakespeare contemporary John Fletcher, and from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. This is both clever and cynical, for the effect would have be utterly ruined if the reader had recognized the words. (as was the case with his more obvious borrowing from Titus to account for the bulk of King Phillip) I wonder as the body of human literature grows with the passing years if each literary age will be boiled down to a single known author, the rest forgotten?

A Storm of Swords

After I finished A Clash of Kings, I told myself I was done with George Martin’s Ice and Fire series. The books were nasty, brutish, and grim; favored characters die like flies, 10-15 pages will be spent introducing a new player sympathetically merely to kill them off, good deeds are consistently punished, and much of the action is very, very dark. They are however, anything but short, and when you’re on a serious reading jag its nice to have some book whose length you measure in inches between covers (without being as insipid as Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels). A Storm of Swords takes an entirely new turn in the plot. Many of the now 1600 page old subplots advance, but the really innovative new material comes from the new subplot about the Starks, recently cast from their ancestral home, and their new mercantile endeavors. Seems Brandon (you remember, the boy who Martin lavishes praise on for 30 pages in the first book, then cripples) is a wizard for marketing, and the few remaining Starks spend most of Stormlaunching a line of winter outerwear under their famous family words, “Winter is Coming”(tm). Storm closes with Brandon masterminding an innovative new line of winter sports gear under updated classic, “Winter is Now!”(tm), in an effort to battle off the encroachment of the “big box” stores from the South, and online, discount e-tailers from the North. Martin is really doing something new, and unprecedented with high fantasy. I’m looking forward to his take on the gentrification of King’s Landing in the upcoming A Feast for Crows.